McLaughlin Motor Car Company Limited was a Canadian manufacturer of automobiles headquartered in Oshawa, Ontario. Founded by Robert McLaughlin, it once was the largest carriage manufacturing factory in the British Empire.
Around 1905, Robert's son Sam starting building automobiles. By 1907, this enterprise had grown to include the manufacture of McLaughlin automobiles with Buick engines. In 1915, the company manufactured Chevrolet vehicles for the U.S. and Canadian market. The carriage end of the business was then sold to Carriage Factories Limited of Orillia, Ontario. James Brockett Tudhope's Carriage Factories would end carriage production towards manufacturing of truck and car parts. The Tudhope firm was sold in 1924 to Cockshutt Plow Company and merged into the Cockshutt Plow owned Canada Carriage and Body Limited of Brantford, Ontario. The Brantford-based firm is now Trailmobile Canada.
McLaughlin was taken over by General Motors in 1918 and merged into General Motors of Canada.
History
McLaughlin Carriage Company
Robert McLaughlin began building carriages in 1867 beside the cutters and wagons in his blacksmith's shop in Enniskillen, a small village northeast of Oshawa, Ontario. In need of more workers to build his horse-drawn carriages, staunch Presbyterian McLaughlin moved to Oshawa in 1876.
McLaughlin developed and (in the early 1880s) patented a fifth-wheel mechanism, which greatly improved comfort and safety. Attracting a great deal of demand, he ignored tempting offers and elected to sell the mechanism to his competitors rather than license other manufacturers. This enthusiasm, now for his complete carriages, spread across Canada. Before the end of the century, there was a McLaughlin sales office in London, England.
On 7 December 1899, the carriage works was destroyed by fire. "We were helpless," R.S. "Sam" McLaughlin later told Maclean's Magazine, "we could only stand and watch our life's work go up in flames. Not only we McLaughlins, but the six hundred men who depended for a living on the carriage works." The City of Oshawa lent McLaughlin $50,000 to rebuild.
McLaughlin Carriage Company of Canada Limited was incorporated in 1901. Production numbers that year topped 25,000 units and included 140 different models, and sales exceeded one million dollars.
By 1915, McLaughlin was making one carriage every ten minutes. McLaughlin Carriage Company was sold to Carriage Factories Limited of Orillia, Ontario, in 1915. The major carriage manufacturers did not close their doors but switched to automobile bodies.
Automobile manufacturing
Around 1905, Robert's son Sam became interested in manufacturing automobiles and traveled to Jackson, Michigan, to purchase a Jackson automobile. While in Jackson, Sam bumped into Billy Durant, who was manufacturing in that city. Sam and Billy had become acquainted, as both were affiliated with the carriage manufacturing business. Durant offered to make a deal, and McLaughlin purchased a Buick from a dealer in Toronto to better understand the product. Before he was halfway to Oshawa (approximately a 30-mile drive), McLaughlin knew he preferred the design of the Buick to the Jackson automobile. However, he and Durant were unable to reach a deal to combine manufacturing operations.
Instead, McLaughlin decided to form his own enterprise. In 1907, the McLaughlin Motor Car Company Limited was formed. An American engineer by the name of Arthur Milbrath was hired away from A.O. Smith to design the McLaughlin Model A automobile. "We brought him [Milbrath] to Oshawa," Sam later recounted, "and installed him in one of our buildings, on the west side of Mary Street, which had been set aside as the automobile shop. We equipped it with automatic lathes and other machine tools, planers, and shapers - dozens of machines. From a Cleveland firm, we ordered cylinders, pistons, and crankshafts to our specifications, and engine castings to be worked in our own shop. The car was to be more powerful than the Buick." Shortly after that, operations came to a stand-still when Milbrath fell ill with pleurisy and the vehicle could not be completed. It has been suggested that Milbraith's ailment was actually a case of "diplomatic flu", which gave the McLaughlins an excuse to partner with Durant and build Buicks. Milbrath later founded the Wisconsin Motor Manufacturing Company.